AI-driven search tool combats COVID-19 pandemic
In the global battle against COVID-19, a new weapon is being forged—Neural Covidex. This innovative search engine, created by University of Waterloo professor Jimmy Lin, is designed to help clinicians, researchers, and other experts navigate the vast amount of information emerging from the scientific community about the coronavirus.
Professor Lin, who also holds the David R. Cheriton Chair in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, has redirected his research to build natural language processing and information retrieval components for exploring the Allen Institute for AI's COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19). This curated resource spans a wide range of topics, including public health, clinical care, epidemiology, genetics, and more, and contains over 45,000 scholarly articles, medical reports, journal articles, and preprints about COVID-19 and the coronavirus family of viruses.
Neural Covidex is a collaborative project involving researchers from the University of Waterloo, New York University, and two undergraduate students, Edwin Zhang and Nikhil Gupta, who are also contributing to its development. Professor Kyunghyun Cho of New York University is working alongside Jimmy Lin on this project.
The development of Neural Covidex is focused on providing a tool to help the global research community in their work against COVID-19. The goal is to bring relevant, actionable evidence about the virus to experts as quickly as possible. The system is intended to provide this information in a user-friendly manner, making it easier for researchers to stay up-to-date with the latest findings.
CORD-19 includes articles dating back to SARS and MERS and previous coronaviruses, ensuring that the historical context of the virus is not lost. The dataset is updated weekly with new research published in peer-reviewed publications and various preprint services, ensuring that Neural Covidex remains a current and reliable resource.
The ultimate goal of Neural Covidex is to build a system that assists experts working on the worldwide pandemic, such as doctors updating clinical care guidelines and virologists developing vaccines. The development of Neural Covidex is ongoing, with efforts to continually improve the system using the latest AI techniques.
In the fight against COVID-19, Neural Covidex is a valuable tool in the arsenal of the global research community. By providing quick and easy access to the Allen Institute for AI's CORD-19 dataset, it is helping to bring relevant, actionable evidence about the virus to experts as quickly as possible. As the development of Neural Covidex continues, it is hoped that it will play a crucial role in the ongoing battle against the pandemic.
